Computer systems and related technologies have become a staple in many aspects of modern society. People have come to rely on these systems as a tool for use in both personal and professional lives. These technologies have, among other things, provided for increased communication and sharing of information among individuals and entities. For instance, computer systems and related technologies are currently used in conjunction with the Internet and local area networks to enable people to access, receive, generate and share unprecedented amounts of data (e.g., documents, spread sheets, presentations, Internet files and email).
While individuals and society as a whole benefit from such free flow of information, there are costs associated with managing such data. Moreover, these costs generally grow as the volume of shared information increases. Accordingly, since more and more information continues to be created and circulated among a greater number of users, an important use of computer systems and related technologies is that of data management.
With respect to email messages, for example, an individual may be inundated with a large number of new email messages. As such, a user may be required to spend significant time and energy reviewing, responding to, organizing and/or sorting through these messages. Moreover, the number of email messages received is often inversely proportional to the amount of time available. For example, a manager who oversees many employees may have very little time to sort through, organize and/or respond to a significant amount of email messages. However, such an individual tends to fall within a group that receives a disproportionately large number of email messages. Some of the manager's email messages may contain information that is of interest (e.g., status reports for ongoing projects). As such, the manager may wish to review these messages one or more times. Other messages may, instead, contain irrelevant information (e.g., unsolicited junk mail). In this case, the manager may wish to spend as little time as possible dealing with these messages and, therefore, would prefer that these messages be discarded immediately. Unfortunately, conventional systems generally do not provide for automatically discarding irrelevant messages and/or prioritizing messages based upon relevance—the messages are not sorted based upon their respective values and sizes. To date, systems and methodologies merely archive messages based upon chronology. Moreover, these systems usually require some type of consent before items can be discarded. As an example, a user is often asked whether it is appropriate to update a list of messages (e.g., whether to archive one or more less relevant messages).
Since information will increasingly be propagated among individuals, managing of such information becomes more of an issue. While it may be desirable to indefinitely maintain all relevant items in an active state so that they can be quickly and easily accessed, technological realities limit the number of items that can be maintained in such a state. More particularly, computer systems have memory limitations. Fast memory that allows computer systems to maintain items in an active state is more limited than slower archival memory. Fast memory is, therefore, generally more expensive than archival memory, making it more costly to store an item in an active state. Moreover, sorting through vast amounts of items in an active state becomes very laborious (e.g., some individuals have thousands of e-mails in an active state)—thus creating a need for streamlining of active items.